Robin Greenwood reflects on work from two London exhibitions: Ribera: Art of Violence at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and Mantegna and Bellini at the National Gallery, London (both on view through January 27, 2019).

Greenwood concludes: “I feel both with Mantegna and Ribera a potent link with art now, if we could but unlock that connection a little better. Both these painters make art of such compelling human content that it challenges many things we might assume about the making of abstract art and the scaled-down narrative of its backstory – except, that is, its necessity to be made anew. If we assume that abstract art is different from, and has no need of relations and comparisons with, the greatness of past figurative art, we diminish the possibilities and close down the options of what, in our own present-day context, we are capable of re-inventing as essentially human.”